Hold On A Minute Before You Upgrade To Windows XP Service Pack 3

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Hold On A Minute Before You Upgrade To Windows XP Service Pack 3

By John F | May 17, 2008

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Before you download and install Windows XP Service Pack 3, take a deep breath, think of a tranquil place in your mind and read on. Installing XP SP3 isn’t as easy as actually downloading it and installing it on your computer! No, that would just be too easy…

You may or may not have read about some people who upgraded having no issues when installing XP service pack 3, and some people having absolute nightmares? Whether you have or not, there are a few checks you should follow before downloading and installing the XP SP3 beast.

The second thing you should do is check out Microsoft’s “Steps to take before you install Windows XP Service Pack 3” page. It’s a useful set of directions to ensure a hassle-free experience. It covers such areas such as fast user switching, administrator rights, error messages and disk space issue you might come across.

For your first point of call I would strongly suggest visiting this page, which is the XP SP3 release notes. The release notes covers aspects such as how to opbtain XP service pack 3, problems that are fixed, hard disk requirements and application compatibility in Windows XP SP3.

One key area that jumps out is that if you have installed IE7 or IE8 before installing SP3 then you will have to remove SP3 to uninstall IE7/8. That could cause a few people problems.

The entire install file is 343MB, and could take a while depending on your Internet connection [maybe Microsoft should upload it as a torrent file..?]. What a pain if you’re on dial-up. If you are on dial-up, hello back there in 1999. The millennium bug thing was just a big fat hoax.

It’s 343MB as the service pack includes all XP updates, ever! The best way to upgrade is to install service pack 3 from Windows Update. That way, you will only download the files that your computer needs. To install XP Service Pack 3, well you have to follow the yellow brick road.

Good luck when installing SP3. I haven’t upgraded as yet, despite writing the above, I’m going to wait a little bit longer to upgrade. Please leave any comments on how you get on upgrading. When I upgrade I’ll post back here, if it makes interesting reading.

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